Personal computer systems have become very sophisticated, providing many different settings that are available to a user. One such setting, described further herein, includes the settings applied to a screen saver, e.g., the time until the computer enters screen saver mode, and the specific thing that forms the screen save once activated.
There are many other similar settings which a user can set.
More often than not, however, users, and especially novice users, simply accept the default settings, and use those settings with their computer.
The screen saver, for example, has the purpose of turning off the display and saving energy. There are other energy-saving settings on the computer.
Perhaps the most aggressive power savings is to turn off the computer completely, thereby saving as much as 400-500 W. However, improperly turning off the computer is an annoyance to the user; since they must turn it back on. Being too aggressive with these power savings settings requires the user to wait for actions to occur: for the screen to come back on, for the hard drive to spin back up, or the like.
Other computer-based devices, such as portable telephones, and digital video recorders, have similar issues with settings.